A blog of Bridge Environment, updated weekly on Thursdays, travel permitting.
Bridge Environment seeks to catalyze a cultural shift in how our society addresses environmental issues. We provide relevant and unbiased advice to any interested party, and also work to educate scientists, policy makers, and the public on how to have a more informative dialog over environmental issues.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

I wanted to start this entry by suggesting that the Chick-Fil-A cows
have it wrong (see picture), but I’ll take
my own lesson in ethodiversity and respect that the cows have different values
than I do. You surely also have a unique set of values. If you care about the
environment, seafood may be a great choice for conscientious eating.

Though seafood
can also offer health and cultural benefits, I will focus on the environmental
aspects today. I will also limit my discussion to fish and shellfish caught
wild from the ocean. The situation is more complicated for farmed seafood
because, for most species (bivalves excepted), there are concerns about their
food source and waste, and about damage to natural habitats from the
construction of their enclosures. With these caveats out of the way, here are two
major arguments for eating wild-caught seafood.

First, seafood
promotes the conservation of wild ecosystems. I love this about seafood; it’s
one of my biggest inspirations for the work that I do. Who would rather eat
some penned in, domesticated animal that was raised on a farm, from land that
is unrecognizable compared to its original natural form, instead of a fish that
swam wild in a natural ecosystem until its quick and relatively merciful death?
Many people tend to worry about choosing seafood because of the negative
effects that fishing may have on ecosystems, yet the alternatives usually come
from a manufactured ecosystem designed to produce food, not sustain nature. This
attitude did not win me friends when I worked for a major conservation
organization but it’s true—if you choose a steak rather than a seafood option
that gets mixes environmental reviews, you are probably doing more harm as a
result.

Second, typical seafood requires fewer inputs in its production and
therefore has a smaller environmental footprint than other sources of animal protein.
These inputs include fertilizer, farm equipment/fishing boats, and
infrastructure and fuel for equipment/vessels, processing, and distribution. Farms
can also be a major source of air and water pollution. Focusing on fuel use, the
most efficient fisheries target aggregations and operate on a large scale. Alaskan
pollock serves as an example and can be found at McDonald’s and in a wide
variety of other breaded, rectangular-shaped fish products (see picture). The
least efficient are fisheries that drag heavy gear across the bottom of the
ocean and thus use substantial quantities of fuel.

There are
downsides to seafood. Its origin in the wild lends itself to higher prices than
many alternative food sources. However, the discerning shopper can find
bargains, whether they be local fish when it’s abundant and on sale or less valuable
choice such as sardines, canned pink salmon, or even Alaskan pollock. When it
comes to inputs, not all seafood is exemplary. If fuel consumption is a
concern, you are better off avoiding choices like scallops and shrimp that are
fuel-intensive. However, eating locally-caught seafood can mitigate these
concerns. When seafood is flown to far-off markets, the amount of fuel involved
skyrockets.

For these
reasons, I will usually feel better about eating wild seafood than alternatives,
animal or vegetable, produced on a farm. The degree of good feeling, though,
and my ability to sustain this pleasure and pass it onto my kids, depends upon
effective management—what
I have referred to previously as sustainability. Given that the average
consumer has limited time to educate themselves about the nuances, what can be
done? Here are a few options:

1. Get educated.
Use sites such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Fish Watch and The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s
Seafood Watch to learn details about
various seafood options. My recommendation would be to focus particularly on
the management system, which is not regularly highlighted. Ask, though, and you
can help to catalyze a cultural change. This alternative does take some work
but is not insurmountable. Once you’ve acquired a base of knowledge it’s less effort
to maintain it, and you can pass it onto your community of friends.
Realistically, though, few people will have time or dedication for this option.
As an alternative…

2. Find a
trusted source of advice. Please be thoughtful, though. Few sources of
recommendations are transparent about the values they use to determine their
list of environmentally friendly seafood and many want you to eat seafood that
matches their values. Stick with a
source that does break down their criteria and whose values match your own. If you
want advice, you are welcome to post a comment on this blog and I will tell you
what I can. Even this option will be too much for many. For most of you, this
alternative may be the best fit…

3. Support watch
dogs like us who work to ensure effective fisheries policies, and a strong
government program of research, management, and education. You can write your
congressional representatives and encourage them to generously support NOAA or
your country’s fisheries agency. Or, you can invest in organizations like
Bridge Environment by donating, or even by simply liking or sharing this blog.

Next week, we
will switch gears temporarily and talk about pollution. Today, I visited an elementary
school my son may attend next year and saw a collection of kids’ science
posters about the effects of pollution on Puget Sound. All seemed to echo the
message “pollution is bad.” Can you guess my response? Tune in next week to
find out.

I thought I would be clever and create that word myself, from the Greek
root etho, meaning value. Turns out I’m
way behind those innovators in workforce management: you know, the ones who do
everything from hanging motivational posters (see Fig. 1) to organizing trust
falls for better teamwork. They’ve been at ethodiversity for over a decade.

I realize that
I’m stepping into a snake pit here. Political parties (one in particular) and many
news organizations in the US seem to have recently developed bad cases of ethoxenophobia (ha, take that workforce
management types, I coined a new word after all, now adding the Greek root xenos, which means strange or different).
The general public is clearly receptive to ethoxenophobia, as evidenced by the
Citadel, “A Community of Liberty” (as seen on the Daily Show). Don’t worry
about liberty translating into ethodiversity, though. According to the Citadel’s
website, “Marxists, Socialists,
Liberals and Establishment Republicans will likely find that life in our
community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles.”
If you are a hopeful “progressive” Democrat noting that progressives were not
mentioned and hoping that you might fit in to a community living in a heavily
fortified walled castle…sorry—I’m pretty sure the people organizing the Citadel
consider you a Socialist if you voted Democrat and Marxist if you did so
happily.

Anyway, back to
seafood. Last week I made my plea to bring back meaning to the word
sustainable, specifically the ability for current management systems to either
restrain fishing pressure or respond to future changes in such a way that the
stock and fishery remain healthy. But, I realize that I am swimming against a
strong current and, let’s be realistic, I don’t have the swimming skills or
singular focus of a salmon. Here’s what I am up against. When most people offer
you an opinion about sustainable seafood, what they are really doing is telling
you what they would like you to eat, not what choice fits your values. This makes
a huge difference because of (did you see this coming?) ethodiversity!

Fig. 2--a plate full of deliciousness

Let’s take dolphin-safe tuna as an example, which may have been first
ever effort to use labeling to change fishing practices. This label goes back
to 1990 and is particularly effective in the US, where virtually all tuna
carries this certification. It was designed to discourage the practice where
fishers encircle pods of dolphins with purse seine nets in order to catch
schools of tuna (adult yellowfin tuna often travel below pods of dolphins). If
only life were as black and white as most ethoxenophobes would have you believe,
the label might have solved all of our problems. But life is more complex. Purse
seiners still catch tuna in the same waters but now often set their nets around
floating material, for example seaweed, driftwood, or specially designed fish
aggregation devices. Floating material attracts ocean life. Smaller fish will
move towards it for shelter and possibly food from the material itself or
organisms that have grown on it. Larger fish come to eat smaller fish. In this
manner, floating material often ends up hosting a whole miniature ecosystem.
When seines are set around such a system, they may not catch dolphins but they
do unintentionally catch a wide array of organisms ranging from undersized tuna
to sharks and perhaps the occasional turtle. Much of this incidental catch is
unmarketable and gets thrown overboard. For
reasons that reflect the underlying ecology, when purse seines are set
around dolphins, they have less of this incidental catch but at the expense of
the occasional dolphin.

Now, which fleet
would you rather buy tuna from: the one risking dolphins or the one killing a
broader range of sea life? But no…you, my loyal readers are smart and must be
asking, “Why can’t we just catch tuna without risking these other creatures?”
The fact is, we can, but the cost of doing so would drive the price of canned tuna
to prices the market would not support. That leaves us with four choices: cheap
tuna that risks dolphins, cheap tuna that risks other sea life, expensive tuna,
or eating something else. Ethodiversity dictates that people will view these
choices differently and the single dolphin-safe label clearly isn’t enough to
promote informed decision-making.

Canned tuna is
not alone—sustainable seafood certification processes and other forms of
seafood labeling and ranking share this problem. Groups like the Marine
Stewardship Council, featured in the NPR series, divide seafood into products
carrying their blue seal of approval and everything else. Organizations like
the Monterey Bay Aquarium provide three categories: green, yellow, and red. For
a busy consumer, such simplification can be extremely useful. Instead of having
to learn a great deal about the ecology and economics of fisheries, they can
simply look for a label or scan a card to see if something is ok to eat.
Unfortunately, ethodiversity is lost in the simplification. Fortunately there
are resources if you are interested in being an educated seafood consumer. The
US government provides a wealth of information about seafood choices, without
picking winners and losers, through NOAA’s fishwatch.gov website. And though
most people don’t look past the green, yellow, and red, the Monterey Bay
Aquarium’s Seafood Watch website (seafoodwatch.org) gives detailed information
behind their reviews.

In next week’s
blog entry, I will encourage you to eat seafood. My pitch only makes sense,
though, if you do it in an educated way that reflects your values. Here at
Bridge Environment we think the world is a better place because of
ethodiversity and do what we can to support it.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Do you seek out sustainable seafood? Have you ever wondered what it
means for seafood to be sustainable? This week, National Public Radio (NPR) ran
a series on sustainable seafood certification, the process by which
some fisheries get identified as good for the environment. This process raises
issues that I have grappled with, on personal and professional fronts, for over
a decade. In fact, the series was brought to my attention by Natasha Benjamin,
who in 2004 did an internship with me in which she focused on ways our
organization might weigh in with advice for concerned seafood consumers.

The NPR stories
shone a critical light on the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), one of the
pioneers in sustainable seafood certification. These stories highlighted that
some MSC-certified seafood products are controversial because stocks have
declined, ocean habitats may be damaged, and especially because information is
often lacking to make a definitive conclusion about whether a fish stock is
healthy.

The stories also
criticized MSC’s process. They noted that MSC often certifies fisheries that do
not yet meet their sustainability criteria. Instead MSC sets conditions that need
to be met in the future. The stories also noted that MSC’s evaluations are done
by consulting firms, which are chosen and paid for by the industry wanting to
be certified, which may produce a conflict of interest.

Though valid on some level, most of these criticisms are distractions
from the biggest issues in identifying and labeling sustainable seafood.
Fisheries rely on complex and dynamic ecosystems. As a result, stocks will
sometimes decline even if they are well managed. Habitat damage is a larger
concern, but one that MSC explicitly considers in certifying a fishery. In
process, the stories failed to note that MSC explicitly chose to use conditions,
with the expectation that this approach would prompt positive change in
fisheries that are willing to improve their practices. The conflict of interest
is also a larger concern, but the outcome of an organization that started on a
tight budget and wanted to see a genuine commitment on the part of a fishery
before considering them for certification.

Uncertainty,
however, is one of the biggest issues in sustainable seafood and is not adequately addressed by MFC,
other sources of advice, or fisheries managers. My
sources who work with the organization suggest that MFC also recognizes the
need to consider uncertainty more fully. First, let’s consider what exactly
sustainable means? It comes from the word sustain, to nourish, and so seems
particularly appropriate for discussions of food choices. In the context of
environmental issues, sustainable seems to be used for almost anything,
particularly when used to market a product or organization (a point made
clearly and with humor here). The formal definition of the word sustainable implies
a practice that can be maintained for the foreseeable future. As I’ve discussed
several times, uncertainty presents a major challenge to the practice of
sustaining a resource, but can be overcome. Traditional salmon fisheries in northern California were
sustainable because they limited their fishing activities to relatively
light levels. Native Hawaiians had sustainable fisheries based on similar
moderation combined with management measures that, in rocket science fashion, responded to early signs of
declines.

Seafood rating
programs could embrace this concept, providing a stamp of approval to fisheries
that use some combination of moderation and responsive management measures to
provide a high degree of certainty that the fish stock would remain healthy.
These measures are represented in the upper right portion of the fisheries policy diamonds I introduced two weeks ago. As
illustrated in that blog entry, such policies would sacrifice some combination
of average catch and constancy of catch to gain in sustainability and ecosystem
function. For fisheries with large uncertainties, these management measures
would have to be more extreme to account for larger probabilities that
something might go wrong.

Unfortunately,
these considerations are not a central focus of seafood guides. MSC puts a lot
of faith in science, which sounds good but can cause problems regarding how
uncertainty is addressed. Rupert Howes, MSC’s chief executive, says “the MSC
standard is rigorous, it’s science-based, and assessment is based on the
evidence. Those numbers are checked again. If new stock assessment data suggest
the population can’t withstand that pressure, new conditions can be invoked, or
indeed certificates can be withdrawn.”

While I am a fan
of reevaluating management systems periodically, why not evaluate them from the
start for the degree to which they are designed to adapt to changing
conditions? This characteristic is the crux of the concept of sustainability
and should be given extensive emphasis when rating seafood choices. That’s my
opinion anyway, based on my values. Next week, I will talk about the other
biggest issue when it comes to sustainable seafood—diverse values.